Posts with the tag "European Space Agency"

In 2009, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to search for “gravitational waves” in space/time. The hypothetical waves should be observable in the luminous, radioactive afterglow of the Big Bang known as cosmic microwave background — aka CMB, aka that stuff that helps make the white noise on your TV. The discovery of these waves would prove that, after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at speeds faster than light. Which is fast.

According to Science, the project may not be finished until 2012. But, in the meantime, we can revel in the beauty of universe-wide CMB pictures.

520 days. That’s 12,480 hours, or how long a six-member, all-male team will be in a windowless mock spaceship to simulate a flight to Mars. The project, called Mars500, began yesterday, and is run by the Russian Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in conjunction with the European Space Agency ESA and China’s space training center.